Main content

Flood Defence Spending

Tim Harford investigates whether there is a north-south divide in the amount of money spent on flood defences in England. What is a hundred-year flood?

Tim Harford and the team take a look at some of the numbers in the news about flooding. What is a one hundred year flood? And is there really a north-south divide in the amount of money spent on flood defences in England?

What is the total number of possible tweets that could be created from 140 characters? In a recent programme Professor John Allen-Paulos told us that when you take into account all of the symbols available, the total number of possible tweets is Googol2.8 (which is a 1 followed by 280 zeros.) But has he missed some options?

One of our listener's questions whether Christmas Eve is really the busiest day on the roads. We take a look at the figures.

Plus - which is the bigger number? The total number of Storm Trooper toys ever made, or the number of real life soldiers serving in armies around the world?

Available now

28 minutes

Last on

Sun 10 Jan 2016 20:00

Broadcasts

  • Fri 8 Jan 2016 16:30
  • Sun 10 Jan 2016 20:00

Just how reliable is our intuition? Find out with The Open University

OU Connect: Put your brain to the test with our new mind-bending probability problems!

When can you trust statistics?

When can you trust statistics?

大象传媒 Ideas discovers three easy ways to help make sense of statistics.

Download this programme

Download this programme

Subscribe to the More or Less Podcast or download individual episodes.